Keep your opt-outs — Today we're making available Keep My Opt-Outs, which enables you to opt out permanently from ad tracking cookies. It's available as an extension for download in Chrome. — Why have we developed this feature? — Recently, the Federal Trade Commission and others …

More Choice and Control Over Online Tracking … The web is evolving quickly in how information about people is collected, used and shared online. We believe it's crucial to put people in control of their personal web interactions and experiences, as previously articulated in my post on our draft Privacy & Data Operating Principles.

How Microsoft plans to market against the iPad — Even though Microsoft's public stance, when asked about the impact of Apple's slate is “iPad? What iPad?”, the Redmondians are preparing the company's partners for battle in 2011. — Microsoft is making available to its reseller partners …

Exclusive: Barnes & Noble phasing out the Nook 3G — Barnes & Noble may be selling millions of Nook products, but it's sounding like the 3G variant hasn't really done its part to help those figures. We've received hard evidence from within B&N that the Nook is being discontinued …

Topaz Specs! Exclusive details on Touchstone v2 and much more! — We've received a massive document detailing HP's plans for the Topaz webOS slate from last year. While these details aren't final, what we know is that HP is planning to make the Topaz highly competitive with the iPad from both a hardware and a software perspective.

So we grew 3400% last year... Honestly, 2010 was just insane. The numbers tell the story better than we can, so we put together this little infographic. (Also, our 6,000,000th user signed up last week!) — Click on the graphic to view full size.

Visualize your LinkedIn network with InMaps — If you're a LinkedIn user, you already know the power of your professional network. — What if you could visualize what your network looks like? Would your connections form clusters or groups? Wouldn't it be great if you could see the way …

Google's Schmidt eyeing TV — Google honcho Eric Schmidt, who announced his plan to hand over control of the tech giant last week, is eyeballing a career in TV, Page Six has learned. — Sources say the outspoken chief, who broke the news that he's passing the CEO title …

Twitter Ad Revenues to Soar This Year — Marketers will spend $150 million on the service in 2011 — Twitter has received enough media attention to be a household word, but still has a relatively small audience. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found in September 2010 that just 8% of online Americans used the service.

White iPhone 4 appears in AT&T's online system — It looks like Best Buy isn't the only retailer with white iPhones popping up in its system. AT&T is now showing two versions of Apple's unicorn-colored iPhone. The entries appear in AT&T's Online Account Management system (OLAM), and read as …

Kodak Loses Ruling in ITC Case Against Apple, RIM — Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) — Eastman Kodak Co., the 130-year-old camera company, lost a U.S. International Trade Commission ruling that may hamper its effort to collect patent royalties from Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd.

The Future Of Java — Java's future will be constrained by the bounds of Oracle's business model. — Drama has been running high since Oracle began to shape up the Java technology it acquired along with Sun Microsystems. Oracle ended the impasse over a new core Java release …

T-Mobile: 10% Of Departing Customers Leave For The iPhone — During a presentation to investors in New York on Thursday, T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm put an explicit percentage on the so-called iPhone effect: how many T-Mobile subscribers leave every month for AT&T just because of Apple's smartphone.

Apple loses buzz, Microsoft gains — The net loss in “media value” last quarter, according to a new report, was nearly $460 million — Click to enlarge. Source: General Sentiment — Here's an interesting exercise. Take the total number of news stories, social media mentions and tweets about Apple …

App Store gets a Twitter — Apple setup Twitter accounts for iTunes some time ago, and today Apple finally got around to launching an official Twitter for the App Store. Apple promises to promote new apps, and exclusive App offers. We wonder what these exclusive app offers mean.

New York Times Readies Pay Wall — Paper Will Charge for Bundled Digital Service, Allow Some Free Access — The New York Times is preparing to introduce multiple subscription packages for access to the paper's website and other digital content, kicking off the biggest test to date …

Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble — Erick Schonfeld: A lot of the excitement around Qwiki is because of its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. Right. Qwiki recently announced closing $8M in financing, and this necessitated a rethink on my part.

VMware sales up 37 percent on continued demand — IDG News Service - VMware's fourth-quarter revenue jumped 37 percent as businesses increased spending on its virtualization software, the company announced Monday. — Revenue for the three months to Dec. 31 was US$835.6 million …

Google Voice Porting Equals LSD Trip Gone Awry — It's a good thing I don't take the Second Amendment as seriously as the First Amendment. — But for that — and firearm waiting periods — my experience porting a mobile number to Google Voice might have made “going wireless carrier” the new “going postal.”

25% of files downloaded from The Pirate Bay are fakes — For years, antipiracy companies like MediaDefender (read our 2007 profile) have scratched out a living by flooding peer-to-peer file-sharing networks with bad data. While the techniques differ, the goal is the same …